Obama FBI faked mass shooting report to help Dems in 2014 election

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Researchers admit heavily-hyped, pre-election FBI study pushing gun control was completely made up and wrong

Two researchers have admitted they helped the Obama administration fake an FBI report that claimed mass shootings were on the rise, which has been released as part of a plan to boost Democrat turnout in the 2014 election.

In September 2014, Texas State University researchers J. Pete Blair and M. Hunter Martaindale, produced a FBI report that claimed mass shooting events were increasing in frequency.

Released just six weeks before the midterms elections, Democrats hoped the report would boost their party’s turnout and hurt Republican candidates in close races.

The report was heavily promoted by the mainstream media, and the White House, as proof Congress must pass more ant-gun laws.

But Blair and Martaindale now admit they “mistakenly reported mass shootings were on the rise.”

Writing in an academic journal published by the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, the pair confesses to the fraud.

“Because official data did not contain the information we needed, we had to develop our own,” wrote Blair and Martaindale. “This required choices between various options with various strengths and weaknesses.”

They admit that pre-election reports that “mass shootings were on the rise” “got it wrong.”

Economist John Lott, speaking to The Wall Street Journal, laid out how the pair faked the study to make it falsely appear mass shootings were increasing.

Despite the fact they had data going back to the 1970s, they started with data from 2000, which had an unusually low number of shootings. By starting there, normal crime rates, and even below-normal crime rates, would appear to be a dramatic increase.

The FBI report also intentionally flat-out ignored 20 mass shootings early in the data set, including one which killed nine people. By deliberately faking the data, the FBI report radically inflated what was an entirely false crime rate.

That fraud made it appear as though mass shootings were increasing (they weren’t) and it was directly tied to reforms in gun laws (it’s not).

The Journal points out that, in reality, the violent-crime rate in 2013 fell by 4.4 percent from 2012 and was 14.5 percent below the 2004 level.

Despite knowing the report was fabricated, the Obama administration published it anyway.

“The administration also knew that the issue could potentially excite Democratic base voters in a year when the party was worried about turnout,” the Journal reports. “The FBI report landed six weeks before the midterm elections, and the administration was hoping that the gun-control issue would help drive Democratic turnout.”